Absurdistan

by Gary Shteyngart

And after getting down on my knobby knees, I say to the INS generals: Please, sirs.

  I say to them like a child: Please, please, please…

  5

  Among the Merry Mourners

  On the way home from the Russian Fisherman, my heart broken with news of Papa’s death, I squeezed in on the Rover’s back bench with Alyosha-Bob and wept into his neck, wiping my nose against his Accidental College sweatshirt. He draped both arms around my head and tickled the willowy hair around my bald spot. From afar it may have looked like an anaconda strangling a rodent, but it was really just my love spilling out over a dear friend. There was even something compassionate about Alyosha’s smell that evening—greasy summer sweat, the sharp pungency of fish highlighted by alcohol—and I found myself wanting to kiss his ugly lips. “Nu, ladno, nu, ladno,” he kept saying, which could be translated as “It’s going to be okay” or “So there it is” or, if you’re a less charitable translator, “Enough already.”

  To be honest, I wept not for my father but for the children. On the way home, we passed by a corner of Bolshoi Prospekt, where last winter I’d had a little breakdown for the stupidest of reasons. I had seen a dozen kindergarten pupils trying to cross the boulevard, each bundled in a jaunty collection of misshapen coats, their shapkas falling off their tiny heads, their feet encased in monstrous hand-me-down galoshes. A boy and a girl, one at the front and one in the back, held aloft giant red flags to warn motorists that they were deigning to cross. A young, pretty teacher was on hand to help them ambulate in the right direction. Who knows why—primordial memory, a sudden reprise of my stunted conscience, a big man’s evolutionary compassion for anything small—but I wept for the children that day.

  Diminutive, cherubic, Slavic, they stood by the teeming Bolshoi Prospekt with those idiotic red flags, their puffy faces producing small steam clouds that looked like little child-thoughts struggling in the monumental cold. The cars kept passing them, the rich man’s Audi and the poor man’s Lada. No one would pause to let them past. As we waited for the light to change, I opened my window and leaned out, blinking like a great Northern turtle in the chill, trying to read their faces. Were those smiles I saw? Delicate new teeth, wisps of blond hair peering out from the fortress of their hats, and grateful, unmistakable grins accompanied by disciplined Petersburg children’s laughter. Only the schoolteacher—silent, straight, proud in the way only a Russian woman who makes US$30 a month could be—seemed cognizant of the collective future that awaited her charges. The light changed, my driver, Mamudov, zoomed ahead with his typical Chechen ferocity, and I looked back at the children, catching the boy with the red flag taking his first careful step onto Bolshoi Prospekt, waving his banner with gusto, as if this were 1971, not 2001, and the flag he held were still the emblem of a superpower. I asked myself, If I were to give each of them US$100,000, would their lives change? Would they learn to become human beings upon completing their adolescence? Would the virus of our history be kept at bay by a cocktail of dollar-denominated humanism? Would they become, in a sense, Misha’s Children? But even with my largesse, I could see nothing positive befalling them. A temporary respite from alcoholism, harlotry, heart disease, and depression. Misha’s Children? Forget it. It would make more sense to have sex with their teacher and then buy her a refrigerator.

  And that, to tell you the truth, is why I cried on the drive back from the Fisherman. I cried for the children of some Kindergarten No. 567, and for my own impotence and collusion in everything around me. Eventually, I promised myself, I would cry for dead Papa, too.

  After we finally made it home, I started popping Ativans, three milligrams at a time, and chasing them with Johnnie Walker Black. It was a good idea. The two substances worked to bolster each other—the anti-anxiety meds made me drunker, and the Black robbed me of panic. Actually, what happened was: I fell asleep.

  When I woke up, I was lying on top of Rouenna, the only girl I knew who was big enough to absorb my weight. She was snoring peacefully, I could feel her massive vagina rubbing against my tummy. Alyosha-Bob came into the bedroom, trailing the sound of laughter and television from the downstairs parlor.

  “Hey, Snack,” Alyosha-Bob said. “Microphone check, big buddy.” He looked warmly at my naked Rouenna passed out on the bed, or rather, the couch. My favorite room was designed to resemble the office of my New York analyst, Dr. Levine, with two black leather Barcelona chairs facing a matching Mies van der Rohe daybed, the kind I used to lie on five times a week until my fat was branded by its indentations. I managed to find replicas of the colorful Sioux tepee photographs Dr. Levine had hung on his walls, although a copy of the drawing resplendent above his couch—a West African stab at the Pietà—has so far proved elusive.

  Alyosha-Bob patted my pretty curls. “Captain Belugin wants to talk to you, homey,” he said. “Come down to breakfast.”

  Breakfast? Morning already? The sky out the window was yellow with cheap exhaust and nearby peat fires. It made me hungry for eggs sunny side up served in a Brooklyn diner. I didn’t say anything. I imagined I was a hospital patient, and draped myself over my friend. I let Alyosha-Bob lead me into the downstairs parlor, past the six empty upstairs bedrooms with their endless tin-pressed ceilings and salmon-colored walls, past the winding wrought-iron staircase embellished with serpents and apples, which I had recently installed in some bizarre biblical gesture.

  Wasn’t there a mourning period for dead parents among the Judeans? I distinctly recall Papa made me sit on a box for a week when my mother died, then we covered up every mirror in the apartment. This was according to custom, I suppose, but mostly we were trying to avoid looking at our own fat, teary punims. Finally we sold the mirrors, along with my mother’s American sewing machine and her two German bras. I can still recall shaky-handed Papa standing in the courtyard of our building, holding aloft the white bra, then the pink one, as the women of our building stepped up to inspect the goods. The Yeltsin era was still ten years away, but already Papa was angling to become an oligarch.

  Downstairs, my parlor was lousy with Russians. I suppose that’s what you get for living in Russia. My manservant, Timofey, and the junior policemen were making venison pie in the kitchen, singing army songs from their stints in Afghanistan, and propositioning my fat cook, Yevgenia. Andi Schmid, the German boy who had caught my father’s last moments, was videotaping himself crawling around the parquet floor, howling fanatically at Lyuba Vainberg’s stupid terrier. The widow herself was, by all accounts, still passed out in the downstairs guest room, pumped full of Halcion and our German guest’s synthetic drug MDMA.

  My appearance stirred no one. The dead man’s son might as well have been dead, too. The television was blaring the morning news program, the Minister of Atomic Energy telling his favorite Chernobyl joke, the one about the balding porcupine. Only Captain Belugin got up to shake my hand. “My heart is filled with sorrow,” he said. “Your father was a great man.”

  “He’s dead, so he’s dead!” one of the policemen yelled from the kitchen.

  “Shut your mouth, Nika, or I’ll fix you one in the mug!” Belugin shouted. “Forgive Nika,” he said to me. “My boys are soccer hooligans in uniform, nothing more.” He bowed a little, both hands on his heart. Belugin’s manner reminded me of one of Gogol’s crafty peasants, the kind of fellow who knew when to flatter his master but also when to copy the ways of educated folk. A far cry from my manservant, Timofey, who thought he was clever if he made off with a block of Dutch cheese or a T-shirt he could pounce at with the Daewoo steam iron I gave him for New Year’s.

  “Who can forget,” said Captain Belugin, “when your dear papa killed that stupid American. Oh, if only we could kill all of them! Now, Germans I like. They’re much more civilized. Look at that nice young Andi pretending he’s a dog. Keep it up, sonny! What does the doggie say? Gav, gav!, he says.”

  “I’m sorry for interrupting,” Alyosha-Bob said. “But why are you here, Captain Belugin? Why don’t you leave Misha to his m
ourning?”

  “I am here to settle some business,” the captain said. “I am here to talk about the terrible crime that has shaken our world. I am pleased to announce that we have solved the mystery of your father’s death, Misha. Your father was killed by Oleg the Moose and his syphilitic cousin Zhora.”

  “Ah!” I cried, but it was no surprise. Oleg the Moose and my papa were once friends and confederates. They had opened a graveyard for New Russian Jews, famous for its designer tombstones that featured the latest S-model Mercedes superimposed over a kind of ballistic menorah. As a follow-up, they were going to build a chain of American hero-sandwich shops on Nevsky Prospekt. The interiors of several landmark nineteenth-century palaces had been completely wiped out and festooned with inflatable fries and man-sized Pepsi bottles. But then, just at the stage when each investor could smell the sweaty odor of roast beef bathed in oil and vinegar, Papa and the Moose, goaded by their various relations and bookkeepers, went on the path of war.

  It was time to say something heartfelt. “The evildoers must be punished,” I said quietly and raised a big, squishy fist.

  “That’s one way to look at it,” Captain Belugin said. “Here’s another way. Oleg the Moose is a childhood friend of the governor of St. Petersburg. They went to chess academy together. They own adjoining property on Lake Como. Their wives go to the same pedicurist, and their children to the same Swiss boarding school. The Moose will never be prosecuted.”

  “But there’s a tape of him murdering Misha’s father,” Alyosha-Bob said.

  “The tape can disappear,” said Captain Belugin, drawing a rectangular outline of the videotape with his index fingers, then making a fluttering motion with his hands.

  “What about the German with the camera?” Alyosha-Bob said, pointing to the filmmaker Andi Schmid, who had taken off his PHUCK STUTTGART T-shirt and was thoroughly examining his own nipples. “He’s a witness.”

  “The German can disappear,” Captain Belugin said. He drew a slender Teutonic outline with his index fingers and made the fluttering motion again.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Alyosha-Bob said. “You can’t just disappear an entire German.”

  “There are eighty million of them, and they all look fairly alike.”

  We were pressed into a brief silence by the last remark. “Maybe I should refer this matter to a lawyer,” I said at last.

  “A lawyer!” Captain Belugin laughed. “Where do you think we are, dear boy? Stuttgart? New York? Your father is dead. This is sad for you. But maybe not entirely sad. Everyone knows you don’t want your father’s business. You’re a sophisticate and a melancholic. So here’s what we do. We broker a deal with Oleg the Moose. He takes over all of your father’s assets for a fair-market value of twenty-five million dollars, plus another three million for killing your papa. Twenty-eight million overall. You and Oleg shake hands. No more blood.”

  Alyosha-Bob stared into the captain’s eyes with an American disgust that I hadn’t seen in years. He spat into his own hand in emulation of our lower classes. “How much is Oleg the Moose paying you?” he demanded. “And who approved Boris Vainberg’s murder? You or the governor?”

  “My commission is fifteen percent,” Captain Belugin said, shrugging. “That’s the standard commission around the world. As for the second question, why talk about ugly things that will only spoil our friendship?”

  Timofey emerged from the kitchen with a plate of mushroom pelmeni. I knew Tima was just trying to soothe my nerves with food, but I had no appetite and so, languidly, threw a shoe at my manservant. As the shoe knocked his temple, I saw a clear picture of my death (heart attack, naturally) at age forty-one on a high-speed train approaching Paris, an elegant Euro woman frantically dialing her mobile phone, the remains of a half-eaten train meal lumped on my crotch. Oh, dear me. Oh, dear bear cub. I did not want to die! But what could I do?

  “I feel bad for the world around me,” I whispered. “Maybe I can start a program for kindergarten children with some of that twenty-eight million. We can call it Misha’s Children.”

  For the first time since I had met him, Captain Belugin surveyed me with genuine pity. He turned to Alyosha-Bob, who was sweating quietly, his bald head glistening, his eyes blinking out a semaphore of useless rage. “Don’t worry yourself with ideas,” Belugin said to him. “There’s no one to turn to. There’s only one power structure in Petersburg. Boris Vainberg was a part of it. Then one day, by his own choosing, he was not. The consequences were predictable.”

  “Go to sleep, Snack Daddy,” Alyosha-Bob said to me. “I will talk with the captain some more.”

  I did as I was told. Back in my bedroom, I hooked my face into Rouenna’s fragrant armpit. Half asleep, she leveraged a fatty cut of my shoulder until she was in position to drool on my arm. I kissed her glossy nose with a mad urgency, like a bird plucking worms for her chicks. “Sweeeeeeet,” Rouenna exhaled between two complicated snores.

  “Love you,” I whispered in English.

  Meanwhile, on the walnut-trimmed Eames lounge chair where Dr. Levine used to loom behind me on Park Avenue, my manservant had placed my childhood Cheburaskha doll. Cheburashka, a star of Soviet children’s television, a cuddly asexual brown creature with his dreams of joining the Young Pioneers and building a House of Friendship for all the lonely animals in town, analyzed me with his enormous liquid eyes. His even larger ears flapped in the summer wind, straining to pick up my lament.

  In a week Rouenna would be leaving me to resume her summer studies at New York’s Hunter College. And I would be left with nothing.

  6

  Beloved Papa Is Lowered into the Ground

  I don’t remember much from the funeral. A lot of Jews came, that’s for sure. One of the big kibbutzniks from the main synagogue on Lermontov Street told me it was Papa’s most fervent wish that I marry a Jewess. He pointed one out to me—tall and skinny, with long wet eyes and a luscious full-lipped mouth—standing by the open grave with a bunch of gardenias pressed to her chest. She was the kind of Russian Jewess who could be sad all year round, who could tell you a thousand different ways in which life was a serious business. “She’s looking good,” I concurred, “but right now I have my American friend.” I bent my head toward Rouenna’s shoulder. She had dressed up in her mourning miniskirt, which highlighted her hips and ass, reminding us all of how we came into being. She reached up to fix my blue blin of a yarmulke, a likeness of the synagogue’s Moorish facade engraved on the back. Papa’s favorite.

  “When you’re ready to be with a real woman, call me at the shul,” said the Jew. “There’s no reason to be all alone in the world.”

  “Well, I’m not all alone,” I said. I put my arm around Rouenna and pressed her close, but he wasn’t buying it.

  “Act quickly, little son!” he said, apropos of the sad Jewess. “Her name is Sarah, and she has many suitors.” He went over to Lyuba, my father’s widow, and wiped her tiny nose for her.

  Lyuba was a wreck, her usually demonstrative blond hair matted over her delicate skull, her black see-through blouse torn in the traditional Jewish sign of mourning (since when was she one of the tribe?), her arms thrown up to the heavens as if begging for the Lord to take her as well. She was howling about how “no one in the world [could] love her like [Beloved Papa]” and falling limp in the arms of fellow mourners.

  Papa had wanted to be buried next to my mother, who was interred in an old graveyard in the wretched southeastern section of the city. The graveyard abutted a suburban station, rails littered with the morning’s first half-conscious alkashy, each trying to suck the last drop out of yesterday’s bottle of Golden Barrel beer, the platform stacked with two overturned cylindrical freight cars, one sporting the stenciled legend POLY, the other MERS.

  The graves had been vandalized with cunning precision. Even the gold engraving was missing from my mother’s tombstone. I could barely make out YULIA ISAKOVNA VAINBERG, 1939–1983, not to mention the golden harp that Papa had added, a r
eference, I suppose, to her being so cultured. (At least, unlike neighboring gravestones, hers hadn’t been crowned with a swastika by the local hooligans.) Oh, my poor mamochka. The soft flesh behind her earlobe, perfect for hiding a child’s warm nose. Gray sweater torn at the elbow, despite the rat-a-tat of her American sewing machine. Nineteen thirty-nine to 1983. From Stalin to Andropov. What a pathetic time to have been alive.

  If only she could have seen me in New York. I would have made her proud. I’d have taken her to a simple clothing shop and bought her a middle-class sweater in some bright new color. That was part of my mother’s beauty—she would have had no need for Botox or marabou-covered mules, not like all the visiting New Russian trash. See, when you’re cultured, being middle class is enough.

  Meanwhile, the haughty Northern sun had assumed its noontime perch and was doing its best to set our skullcaps ablaze. In Russia, even the sun has a distinctly anti-Semitic disposition. Gusts of wind smelling of something Soviet and unkind—polymers?—coated us with empty candy wrappers roused up from the garbage pit of a nearby housing complex, which was, like so many other things, partly collapsed and partly on fire. Gooey with chocolate and spit, the wrappers stuck to us like leeches, turning us into advertisements for such homegrown delicacies as SNEAKERS and TRI MUSHKETEERS.

  It was a shtetl funeral, in many ways, a kind of impromptu klezmer act minus the musical instruments. Lots of wailing and feigned heart attacks, the pressing of young faces to old bosoms. “Comfort the child!” some putz was screaming in my direction. “The poor orphan! May God watch over him!”

  “I’m fine!” I shouted back, waving weakly at the excited mourner, one of my idiot relatives, no doubt. They were all sticking their business cards into my pocket, in hopes of an eventual handout (Papa had left them nothing), and wondering why I was so estranged from the lot of them, why I wasn’t friends with my harebrained cousins or slutty young nieces and predatory nephews, who spent their Friday nights tearing down Nevsky in their cheap Russian Niva jeeps, trying to pick up malnourished girls in tight synthetic duds or working-class boys with primitive greaser haircuts. The number of Vainbergs, young and old, still haunting the earth amazed me. During the thirties and forties, Stalin had killed half my family. Arguably the wrong half.